Ukuleles: Automatic Happiness!

Tsunehisa Ikeda not only figured out the tabs for "As Many Times As Always," the Joe Hisaishi-penned theme from the Spirited Away soundtrack, he recorded a video of his own performance, with the chords superimposed at the bottom. Color me hella impressed -- it sounds awesome.

"ソロウクレレで「千と千尋の神隠し」"いつも何度でも"を弾こう！ Spirited Away solo ukulele lesson" (Watch on YouTube)

( Click here for tabs )

It turns out you can translate a big band sound down into a ukulele pretty well!

"Tuxedo Junction - Solo Ukulele" (Watch on YouTube)

obviouslycloe, your buddy D.A. rocks.

Nope, your eyes do not deceive you. I say let's give this another whirl, starting with kendrauke's awesome (and useful!) fretboard doodle.

Via allthingsukulele. Have a good weekend, all -- do something to put a smile on someone's face, yours included.

tomscott posted this back in August, and frankly, coming back to it, I'm still delighted. A banjolele plus 50 Cent's "In Da Club" is a pretty genius combination. It's very Boardwalk Empire. Foul language and bleeps ahead!

You can see more about Ewan Wardrop and his George Formby impersonations here.

This has been a personal project of mine on and off since this spring. I've finally come up with ukulele-friendly tabs for "Sigh No More, Ladies" from Kenneth Branagh's excellent Much Ado About Nothing. The only tabs I'd been able to find were for guitar, but after some tooling around, I've come up with the following. I think it sounds pretty good!

( Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more / Men were deceivers ever... )

You can download a PDF here; sorry the above isn't text-only, but the formatting wasn't holding in terms of spacing out the lyrics with the notes. If anyone wants the plain text (RTF), drop me a line. If the formatting isn't making sense either, let me know. Happy Monday, gang!

This Oxford, Mississippi-based hipster sensation shows us how it's done. Apparently in his sophomore album he's moved on from the ukulele, since he doesn't want to be pigeonholed, but frankly he makes it a pretty good hole to be pigeoned in.

(There's also an official music video, but I like this version best.)

Still, who needs to watch Some Like It Hot again? Me, for certain.

(There's not a whole lot of actual ukulele playing in this clip, but... oh well? Happy weekend, folks!)

I love watching Jake Shimabukuro. The dude's a genius, and he's clearly having so much fun. I'm always impressed by how he reminds me how much sound our little ukes can make. Here he is covering Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" (I confess I am a sucker for that song), and for one guy with a tiny instrument, he sure is creating a big, big noise.